Grand Chain

Couthie on the Craigie

Scotland the Hyperreal and the Unionist paradigm

In recent weeks, an advertising campaign for Grant's whisky has
utilised proverbial-sounding pseudo-Scots phrases such as Couthie on
the Craigie, and challenged the Scots public to work out their
meaning. Whether the phrases have any meaning is irrelevant to the
perceptional objectives of the campaign - an image of an authentic
Scotland is created. It is my objective to explore this
hyper-reality, and to discuss what relevance it has to the Unionist
paradigm.

John Major sought to plant a sense of Britishness in the face of a
greater Europeanisation by calling to an identity which all know to
have passed, but which nevertheless retains substantial power as a
mythical landscape:

Fifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on
county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, and - as George Orwell
said - old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist.
And, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read - even in school.
Britain will survive in all essentials.

Similarly, from as early as the eighteenth century, the landscape of
Scotland is represented as a mythical one. Guidebooks and travel
writing emphasised wild grandeur, remoteness and peace, and a
romantic history. The process of myth-making can be observed in
paintings. The eighteenth century artist Paul Sandby produced two
paintings. The first - painted in the early part of the century -
shows straightforward realistic detail. The second of thirty years
later shows the same mountains made more rugged, with fir trees and a
man in a kilt added, presumably for greater authenticity

In the twentieth century, this fiction is still perpetuated. Scottish
Tourist Board publications represent Scotland as having peopleless,
dramatic landscapes, the everyday melting into the exotic and
majestic icons of castles and pipers. As Womack noted:

That all Scots wear tartan, are devoted to bagpipe music,
are moved by the spirit of clanship and supported Bonnie Prince
Charlie to a man - all these libels of 1762 live on as items in the
Scottish tourist package of the twentieth century.

These representations of Scotland show an almost hysterical rush from
the reality to the image, where the sign has more potency than the
reality if it carries a greater impression of reality. This is
clearly demonstrated in the Grant's campaign, and in such works as
Capercaille's 1993 album, Secret People in which Gaelic songs are
given a greater authenticity by the not being translated. This
reflects Baudrillard's conclusion that "Art today has totally
penetrated reality", and is a classic demonstration of post-modern
hyper-reality.

But why does Scotland place such an emphasis on cultural and
historical signifiers, rather than political ones? Why are Scots
content with being "Ninety minute Nationalists" at Murrayfield
and Hampden Park? And why is there a separation between the two
discourses? Scots such as Michael Forsyth are more than happy to
value aspects of Scottish cultural difference. Why then does it take
the prospect of electoral suicide to force him to recognise political
difference?

There is perhaps no more potent symbol of political power in Scotland
than Edinburgh Castle. In any nation, a castle in such a prominent
place would be a symbol of national pride. In Scotland, the castle
flies the Union flag, a flag which grows every year, particularly
when Edinburgh is the centre of national attention. And yet, the
castle is a key element in the marketing iconography of Scotland. How
is this allowed by the people of Scotland?

The answer is that they no longer need the threat of military action,
and the power over their bodies which was required for Wallace and
the Jacobites. The people of Scotland have internalised the political
power which England has over Scotland. As the Westminster parliament
commented shortly after the signing of the Act of Union:

We have catch'd Scotland, and we will bind her fast.

This Foucaultian episteme predicts that once such an internalised
system of power is established, no substantial political opposition
is possible. And yet, to be effective, such a discourse has to be
seen as productive and enabling rather than coercive. While there is
certainly a demand for greater autonomy for Scotland, the general
opinion - as measured by the support for the manifestly unionist
Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative Parties - is that there is
value in the Union. It is a central plank of the ideological makeup
of the Conservative and Unionist Party in Scotland that Scotland is a
financial - in terms of the Barnet funding formula - and political -
in terms of the number of Westminster seats for its population -
beneficiary of its constitutional position. That it has been shown
to be the reverse is not acceptable to those who have internalised
English domination.

However, it is to be noted that this internalisation of power is by
no means universal. A symbolic reclaiming of power took place at
Edinburgh Castle in 1991, and Stirling Castle in 1994 when the Gaelic
band Runrig played a number of concerts. That this was allowed at all
was a significant retreat by the strongly Unionist military
establishments which have responsibility for the sites. In creating a
discourse of the acceptability of an internalised acceptance of the
Unionist hegemony, it was necessary to create excluded groups.
Runrig, in common with much of Scottish traditional music embodies
many of these excluded threats to the peace of mind of the British
state.

Excluded histories have long been a rich vein of material for
folk-songs in Scotland and its close musical cousin, Ireland.
There is a dictum within folk music circles that the victors write
the history books, while the vanquished write the songs. Songs
articulate the experience of working people - on the land or in
cities:

Well ye can see them a', the lads o' the Fair;
Lads fae the Forth and the Carron water
Workin' lads and Lads wi' gear; Lads wha'll sell ye the Provost's daughter;
Soldiers back fae the German wars;
Fiddlers up fae the Border
And Lassies wi' an eye for mair than the kye at the Trystin' Fair at Falkirk

Songs enable those outwith the Anglophone community to express their
world view as here, or in the Scots extract above:

Direct political comment is also common in the Celtic tradition,
particularly in relation to Ireland. The following extract was
written by Bobby Sands for his comrades from Derry in the H-Blocks,
and sung out through the keyhole to them.
In 1803 we sailed out to sea, out from the sweet town of Derry
For Australia bound if we didn't all drown and the marks of our fetters we carried
In rusty iron chains we sighed for our wains, as our good wives we left in sorrow
As the mainsails unfurled our curses we hurled at the English and thoughts of tomorrow.
Oh Oh Oh Oh I wish I was back home in Derry
Twenty years have gone by and I've ended me bond and comrades' ghosts are behind me
A rebel I came, and I'll die the same. On the cold winds of night you will find me.
Finally songs enabled immigrants - particularly the Irish immigrants
- and travelling people to speak for themselves, or to have singers
speak on their behalf:

Don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work
Or you'll end up where you came from like the rest of us...diggin'....Ow di diddle ow
And we want to go to heaven but we're always diggin' holes
Well there's one thing we can say, we know where we are goin'
-Any chance of a start? - No - ok
Enoch Powell will give us a job, diggin' our way to Annascaul
And when we're finished digging' there he'll close the hole and all
Now there's six thousand five hundred and fifty-nine Paddies over in London
All trying to dig their way back to Annascaul and very few of them boys is going to
get back at all - I think that's terrible.

Born on the common by a building site
Where the ground was rutted by the trail of wheels
The local Christian said to me
"You'll lower the price of property"
You'd better get born in some place else.
Move along, get along
Go! Move! Shift!

But whose excluded history does Scottish popular culture represent?
One problem is that all the role models presented are essentially
masculine. Military heroes such as Bruce or Wallace, socialist
leaders such John MacLean or James Connolly, writers such as Scott or
Burns only speak in a masculine voice. Even the leading contemporary
Gaelic writers - Aongus Dubh, Sorley Maclean and Calum Macdonald of
Runrig speak of a masculine landscape. Only the waulking songs
preserve a female voice, and even that is a voice which often spoke
at the request of men, reciting the story of battle victory and
spoils:

In pondering the desirability of reconstructing a Celtic identity, it
is perhaps useful to consider why such a reconstruction has become so
attractive in recent years.

To claim the Highlands is to claim the identity of a residual Celtic
nation, a pre-industrial nation. This claim axiomatically rejects the
capitalist hegemony, as is echoed by the contrast between Edwin
Muir's socialist interpretation of the cities of Glasgow and
Edinburgh, and this more sympathetic treatment of Scotland's
countryside in his Scottish Journey. Such a rejection is inherent in
youth movements since the 1960's, and it is perhaps surprising that
a Celtic identity has only recently come to prominence. Any cultural
signifiers which mark a Highland culture would be expected to be
appropriated to support this assumption of identity. It is therefore
no surprise that wearing of Tartan - independently of Vivien Westwood
- ceilidh dancing, musical genres such as Puirt a Beul and above all
an interest in Gaelic language have grown at a substantial rate among
young people in Lowland Scotland.

Such a preference of the hyper-reality of Scotland the mythical-Brave
over Scotland the late-twentieth-century-Reality positively
disenfranchises the people of Scotland from the political and
socio-economic process. As Brian McNeill and Hamish Henderson
savagely commented:

And tell me will we never hear the end
o poor bloody Charlie and Culloden yet again
though he ran like a rabbit in the glen
leavin' better folk to be butchered
Or are you sittin' in your council house thinkin' o' your clan
Waitin' for the Jacobites to come and free the land?
Try goin' doon the broo wi' a claymore in your hand
and then count all the princes in the queue.
For there's no Gods and there's precious few heroes,
but there's plenty on the dole in the land of the leal.
And it's time now to sweep the future clear o'
the lies of a past that we know was never real.

Given that cultural signifiers have been created to enforce the
Unionist paradigm, is it then necessary to proscribe references to
them before political change is possible? Cultural signifiers can be
used as part of a mobilisation of a political will. However, it is
necessary to use them as a means of awakening interest in political
gains only, otherwise they become tools of a system of power which
emasculates the political process.